In cooperation with the Nuon company, Shell is developing an
IGCC plant in the Netherlands, which is supposed to process 2000 t of
coal per day. The fossil-based emission of CO2 shall be cut by 20% by
co-feeding biomass to the gasifier [22]. The developments of Shell are
focusing on implementing low grade fuels such as lignite or biomass.
The most important feature is a dry feed system which brings
considerable savings in oxygen consumptions since there is less water
contained in the feedstock that has to be evaporated and heated. The
technically sophisticated and capital intensive equipment compensates the before mentioned advantage to some extent. The Shell
gasification process is based on relatively high temperature levels
around 1500 °C. This causes comparably higher thermal losses. For
that reason complex multi-stage gas cooling is applied to recover the
released thermal energy [6]. Regarding a fully biomass based
feedstock, it has to be investigated how the high ash content of
biomass affects the clogging of gas cooling systems. Another drawback
in fuel und chemicals production is the large amount of excess heat
which cannot be completely integrated